Collection Romain Louvel

Building a collection

Four expeditions travels took place in Rennes (one week in March 2012 and three weeks in March 2013), in Tarragona (three weeks in January 2013) and in Warsaw (three weeks in May 2013). The crew was composed by eight artists, four sociologists, two sociolinguists, an anthropologist and at least 10 educators working with children. This project called Expeditions was possible due to the work of L’Âge de la Tortue, the co-organizers, partners and invisible persons working in the backstage, as you can take notice on www.expedition-s.eu

In June 2013, exploratory travels ended, the Expeditions crew went back home. The aim of this time was to manifest this return by several exhibitions. This last step of the project is part of its metaphorical, historical and artistic approach. It took the shape of three installations (in the broadest sense of the term) in the Contemporary Art Center “La Criée” in Rennes (from 6.15.2012 to 8.12.2012), in the “Museo del Port” in Tarragona (from 9.21.2013 to 10.25.2013) and in the Museum of Wola in Warsaw (curating by Ania Banas from 11.27.2013 to 01.12.2014). The elements from the catalog that you have in your hands constitute the material of what we brought from our expedition.

“Collection Romain Louvel” is the name given to this collection, which is considered as an ensemble. It consists in an descriptive inventory. The acquired objects are classified from the order made by L’Âge de la Tortue with the authors during the Expeditions project. The deposited objects were created during the residencies of the project, such as traces, documents, quotations, images. The authors retain their copyrights (with L’Âge de la Tortue for a few of them) and only the representation of objects is contained in the collection. The authors accept to appear in this collection which index what they did. Estimations for each object are indicative for the insurance value in case of exhibition.

The stake of this catalog is to show as precisely as possible each objet from the collection. It consists in artworks, documents, scientific works and other « travel stories » which constitute the formal fund of the knowledge production involved in the Expeditions project. The aim of this catalog is to conceive a common tool in order to build an exhibition, which could take place in different places. The hypothesis is that exhibition choices should result of the context and
its imperatives (whether they are artistic, aesthetic, scientific, economic, temporal, spatial…). They will lead necessarily to several different exhibitions from the same catalog, as it was the case for previous exhibitions. These choices and differences introduce reception and interpretation parameters which contribute to the social construction of the meaning and value gift to the material brought from expeditions. Then, curating, mediation and scenography continue the process of knowledge construction which is given in principle a priori by the objects from the catalog, since the original intentions of the authors.
All photos, texts, pictures, videos and audio recordings are from the working residencies in the frame of the Expeditions project. Images are extracts, screen captures or photographies which show the object in it entirety or a detail of it. Almost all the elements of the Collection are visible and audible at www.expedition-s.eu/.

The catalog is structured in 8 parts in which the objects of the Collection are gathered by nature, that is : videos, slideshows, photos, posters, audio recordings, objects (including installations), editions and text quotations.